The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-07-23

home of "The Tattooed Man." to Cali fornia, and from Michigan to Mexico, the whole continent is one vast, siz- zling. red-hot bake-oven, with sky of glowing brass for lid, and every brick and cobble- stone gleaming coal Simmer! sizz-zz-zz! {! roll pitch 1. bubble-uble-uble! Whizz-hiss-ss-s ss 1! Hist! Hear it. A whole mighty Nation, with big, big N, Gin spite of Grand Army cranks, bourbon irrecon- cilables and imported miscreants), cooking, cook, cook, cooking, at once.
 Hot! Purgatory would not be much change of climate, even without Bob Ingersoll's little blasphemous squirt-gun. Every thermometer from Cape Cod to Corpus Christi has kicked the top out, and Bodied over like the Arkansaw doctors patient who took twelve white and twelve blue seidlitz- powders separately. Fat old ladies are daily dipped up in ladies on all our city thoroughfares, and borne away in tubs to adjacent ice cream saloons to be remodeled and frozen over. Boots are often found in the streets, filled with rancid grease, and ad-brimmed hat resting on the straps; the owner having just thawed away, melted down, till noth- ing more was left of him. All the wax figures in our museum chambers of-horrors have run together, so that George Washington is "stuck on" Nina VanZandt and Napoleon Bona urfn WnllinnfAn n1 AIaltno IbotfV mingle in an omelet of many -colored beeswaX. Bright eyes sparkle like flashing horseshoes on village black smiths anvil. Heaping coals of fire on your enemy's head is the easiest command in all scripture to obey. All the popcorn patches in Illinois have popped instead of sprouting, and the hills are full of red-white- blue popcorn balls, ready for the next cir GUS season. Fishermen in all the lakes about Oconomowoc, at Chautauqua and Creve C9ur. are catching boiled trout and pickerel with chili sauce.
 The tinkle of brooklets, the gentle murmur of cascades, is dried before it gets twenty feet from the banks into the rattle of hot pebbles or the harsh chatter of hurtling buckshot. The soft-breathing notes of the sere- nading lovers tuneful larynx and harmonious feline intestines are parched, before they reach his white robed idols second-story window into the dry, dead cackle of singed buff falo hide or burnt shoe-sol The very "milk oi human kindness" has evaporated beneath the solar torrid- ity, and left nothing but little dusty chalk and indigo. Rivers, creeks, horse ponds, lakes and duck puddles in many regions have vamoosed like and naught but struggling daubs of slime remain to tell one where they were. Catfish, eels and tadpoles are running all over the country with tin cups in their mouths, asking every body they meet to give them a drink of water. Baptist revivals are brought to standstill. Noah's freshet would hardly moisten the truck-patches of Zion. All creation is scorched and athirst. Chandeliers matin hymn sounds like it were piped through the thigh bone of three thousand years shriveled mummy of the Pharaohs, and the f1uttering of his wings re- sembles the clashing together of charred saddle-flaps. Even Ret Clarkson's watery yawps for Blaine over in Iowa have lost their juiciness, and grown hoarse and husky as the rasping of a donkey's hoof with a rusty file.
 Reader friend, if it is so hot in this beautiful world of lakes, rivers and cascades, of cloud-wreathed peaks and misty wales, of oceans, rivulets, rills, soda-pop and gin fizzes, think what it must be in that devils and politicians realm where the roasted millionairey incarnation of selfishness and greed begs, through all eternity's countless ages, for one drop of water from a dog licked beggar's finger-tip! Think of it, and keep away from there. Think of it, and flee to the glorious, wind swept, lake-gemmed summerland of the New Northwest that lies along the lines of the Chicago & North western, the Manitoba and the Cana dian Pacific railways-the summer land of Dakota and Manitoba-where everybody is still wearing winter fiannels and buffalo overcoats, and sleeping under double blankets where "the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night" and where life is perpetual dream of bliss too bright, too beautiful for common earth.